005 - Saturation of the Same – Trends B-sides
Here are some human implication of technology Trends I’ve been a part of writing.
Written by Mariam Merchant, Nikol Keserdzhieva, Tommaso Ottaviani, and Viraj Joshi in Spring / Summer 2023.
Saturation of the Same
We are all jumping from crisis to crisis. The costs are high, our jobs are dear, and they can also feel drab. We are all wanting to get by, stay safe, and if it all goes well – grow steadily. When given a choice between the fun experimental; and the mundane safe, most of us are choosing the latter.
The products, services, culture, and media that we interact with also yearn stability. They are shedding their fat to achieve bland and safe growth.
Companies are making decisions by the numbers that analytics and algorithms show us – and the numbers are playing us into making the most widely accepted, banal choices.
To augment this further, we’re met with a deluge of computer generated monotony. Websites, written content, brand identities all feel like we’ve seen them before.
The je-ne-sais-quoi charm in the speeches of Obama and the music of Drake is now codified in the black box of AI.
We live in a saturation of the safe, a saturation of the same; and imagination, and creative deviation is seen as a cost, is seen as a luxury.
A world in perma-crisis yearns stability and this amplifies risk-aversion. Culture, behaviours, products, and services will feel same-y, and ultimately boring.
The response to perma-crisis was fight, flight, focus, freeze, fawn. People and businesses adapted by providing the safest, most people-pleasing answers.
